The Guardian Climate Change

Extreme heat affecting nearly 23m people across US south-west and pushing Texas’s electrical grid to the limit

A heat dome covering the US’s south-west region is affecting nearly 23 million Americans, bringing with it some of the highest temperatures of the summer and putting pressure on the electrical grid in Texas.

The heat dome phenomenon occurs when strong, high pressure traps hot air over a region, preventing cool air from traveling in and causing temperatures to rise on the ground and stay high.

These new proteins could be our best hope of averting catastrophe. But governments are trying to have them banned

For many years, certain car manufacturers sought to obstruct the transition to electric vehicles. It’s not hard to see why: when you have invested heavily in an existing technology, you want to extract every last drop before disinvesting. But devious as in some cases these efforts were, they seem almost innocent in comparison with the concerted programme by a legacy industry and its tame politicians to suppress a far more important switch: the essential transition away from livestock farming.

Animal farming ranks alongside fossil fuel production as one of the two most destructive industries on Earth. It’s not just the vast greenhouse gas emissions and the water and air pollution it causes. Even more important is the amount of land it requires. Land use is a crucial environmental metric, because every hectare we occupy is a hectare that cannot support wild ecosystems.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Turnout at blood drives affected as summers get hotter and extreme weather causes cancellations, Red Cross warns

The climate crisis is threatening the medical blood supply in the US, with this summer’s record heat contributing to an emergency blood shortage, the American Red Cross has warned.

As summers in the US get progressively hotter, blood drives across the country to persuade people to donate are facing challenges. In the month of July alone, when more than 130 million Americans were under heat advisory warnings, the American Red Cross said that turnout at almost 100 of its blood drives was affected by the weather.

Record sea temperatures in the Mediterranean contributed to waterspout that hit Bayesian

Record temperatures in the Mediterranean Sea this summer contributed to the freak storm that sank a superyacht off the coast of Sicily, with similar extreme events expected to increase in frequency and intensity as the climate crisis tightens its grip, Italian scientists have said.

One person is confirmed to have died and rescuers are searching for six missing people, including the British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, after the 56-metre Bayesian capsized in the early hours of Monday.

Decision to end year-long pilot scheme for financial reasons condemned by trade unions and opposition parties

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Scottish ministers will reintroduce peak rail fares across the country after an experiment with flat rate fares failed to significantly increase passenger numbers.

Trade unions and opposition parties condemned the decision, and accused the Scottish government of presiding over a shambolic rail service and of failing to adequately tackle the climate crisis.

In today’s newsletter: Our Seascapes editor on the dangers our seas and oceans face – and what we can do to help

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Good morning. The oceans are – according to the UN – “the world’s greatest ally against climate change”. While many of us now understand the urgent need to take the climate crisis seriously, the focus is still very much on the land and the air. Oceans cover more than 70% of the surface of the planet, generate 50% of the oxygen we breathe, absorb 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions and capture 90% of the excess heat generated by these emissions.

Perhaps it is time we stopped to think a bit more about our seas, consider the dangers they face and look at what we can do to help. Lisa Bachelor, who edits the Guardian’s Seascape series about the state of our oceans, has – if not all the answers – quite a few of them. She joins us after the headlines.

US politics | Joe Biden took the stage at the Democratic national convention Monday to deliver a reflective and optimistic address, telling the crowd: “I made a lot of mistakes in my career, but I gave my best to you.” Earlier, Kamala Harris made a surprise appearance to thank Biden for his “lifetime of service”.

Italy | UK tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his daughter Hannah were missing, along with Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer and three others, after their yacht sank off the coast of Sicily during a violent storm. The British-flagged Bayesian was carrying 22 people when it was hit by a tornado.

Care workers | The number of foreign social care workers reporting that they are trapped in exploitative contracts has risen sixfold in the last three years, in the latest evidence of widespread abuse of migrants in the British care system.

Israel-Gaza war | The current round of ceasefire talks is “maybe the last opportunity” to broker a truce and a hostage and prisoner swap, the US secretary of state has said during a visit to Israel. After a three-hour one-on-one with Benjamin Netanyahu, Anthony Blinken said that the Israeli prime minister “supports” the ceasefire proposal.

Ukraine | Ukrainian forces destroyed a third bridge over the Seym River in Russia’s Kursk region as part of an apparent attempt to expand what Volodymyr Zelenskiy has described as a military “buffer zone” against attacks. It was the last major crossing on this part of the front.

The opposition has still produced nothing to back up its widely disputed claim that Australia could have an operational nuclear industry before the 2040s

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Journalists are obsessed with the new. We cast around every day to tell audiences something they don’t know. That’s the job.

Sometimes, when we get it right, we reveal information that’s substantial and deserves exposure and scrutiny. Sometimes we aim for a different type of revelation – one that comes from picking apart and giving context to claims that are demonstrably not true, but have been repeated so often they have become a regurgitated part of public debate. This fact-checking role can feel repetitive and, frankly, exhausting. But it’s also part of the job.

Climate campaigners criticise decision to allow capacity to increase from 6.5m to 9m passengers a year

Ministers have approved London City airport’s application to expand, in a decision that has disappointed climate campaigners.

The airport submitted a proposal to increase capacity from 6.5 million to 9 million passengers a year by putting on more weekend and early morning flights. Local campaigners and Newham council opposed the move, arguing the air and noise pollution would affect people living nearby and that it could potentially increase carbon emissions.

Thousands of firefighters are deployed as an all time record for acres burned – and it’s only August. Now some worry about the long months ahead

It’s still early in the wildfire season for the American west, but it’s already shaping up to be a tough and, in some cases, record-breaking year.

Oregon has seen more fire than any year on record, with almost 1.5m acres (607,028 hectares) scorched in recent weeks as huge wildfires, primarily caused by lightning strikes, have exploded across the region. Nearly 70 major fires are burning across the US this week alone, primarily in Oregon, Idaho, Washington and California, according to the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC).

As the UK climate changes, many species are marching towards cooler climes – but trees are being outpaced. Some ecologists say assisted movement is the answer

At the top of an ancient oak at Knepp estate in East Sussex, a white stork has made a scruffy nest. The birds made headlines in 2020 when, after an absence of centuries in the UK, the first chick hatched. Alongside bison, beavers and white-tailed eagles, the storks are one of many species reintroduced to Britain in recent decades in an effort to restore animals to ecosystems where they had been wiped out. The oak tree, by contrast, has been here continuously for 12,000 years.

But ecologist Charlie Gardner is worried one of them may not have a future here – and it’s the oak. By 2050, London’s weather could resemble that of Barcelona, with long stretches of summer drought. These ancient trees were not designed to thrive in such conditions. “More and more individual trees will die and reproductive success will fall,” says Gardner. Around the world, millions of creatures facing unprecedented temperatures and habitat loss are on the move. The climate crisis is causing a vast array of species – from algae to butterflies, woodlice to birds – to shift northwards. Species are travelling north at a median rate of 17km a decade, according to 2011 research. That average equates to 20cm an hour – two to three times faster than previous estimates.

While tourists flock to the Italian island in greater numbers, a water crisis is intensifying for its rural population

For the first time in four generations of his family’s farming history, Vito Amantia’s threshers have lain silent this year. The 650,000kg of wheat that his farm would usually produce in a year has been lost, parched and withered under the scorching sun and relentless drought.

“A seasoned farmer doesn’t need to check the weather forecast to understand what the weather will be like,” says Amantia, 68, who farms on the Catania plain in eastern Sicily. “Already last January, I knew it would be a disastrous year. The wheat seedlings that normally reached 80cm stopped at 5cm. Then they dried up.”

Author Paige McClanahan says there is a way to be your best self abroad – it starts by visiting fewer places and spending longer there. Can her approach end the growing anger around overtourism?

Tourism has never had a great reputation, given that the very word “tourist” is pejorative. At best, it suggests someone whose interest is superficial and whose understanding of a place is nonexistent. What’s the first thing you think, when you hear the phrase, “They’re a bit of a tourist”? You think, that person is annoying. But the word’s reputation has plummeted further in recent years. Anti-tourism movements are springing up across the world: that might look like a protest march, as in Barcelona, where one placard bluntly pleaded “Tourists go home; you are not welcome here”. It might look like a visitor fee, as Venice introduced this year, or it might look like the mayor of Amsterdam simply closing the cruise ship terminal, as she did last year.

Part of this is about sheer volume: the number of people crossing an international border as tourists (rather than displaced people or migrants) in 2023 was 1.3 billion, which is not only a complete bounceback post-Covid, but an almost 25-fold increase since the 1950s. Driven not only by flights becoming ever more affordable, but the online convenience of booking travel – from the launch of last-minute flight and hotel brokers in the late 90s, to Airbnb in the late 00s, followed by Google Flights and Trips – everything about travel has become easier and cheaper. But the difficulties and costs still exist, they’re just paid elsewhere. Tourism accounts for just over 8% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Short-term holiday rentals distort housing markets until the locals are spending summer months living in car parks – as has happened in Ibiza.

It’s a big moment for the Russian-born photographer known for her dreamlike images of Miami after the 2017 hurricane. Here she talks about upcoming shows in London and New York, plus a new book surveying her career to date

“The first rule of hurricane coverage,” the Florida-based crime novelist Carl Hiaasen once quipped, “is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind.”

In Anastasia Samoylova’s photographic series FloodZone, made in the immediate wake of the 2017 hurricane that wreaked havoc on Miami, palm trees are a less graceful symbol of the acute climate anxiety that lies beneath the city’s American dreamscape. Against the art deco facades of Miami Beach they often look abject: uprooted, upended and, in one unforgettable image, balancing precariously against a pale white building above a sickly pink pavement.

Political leaders fret about the ‘fertility crisis’. That’s nonsense, experts say. There’s a desperate need for population shrinkage

• Birthrates are plummeting worldwide. Can governments turn the tide?
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“We’re taking things from the people of the future now,” Mary Heath says from the kitchen where she’s drying seeds to plant. The climate activist is talking about Earth Overshoot Day, the ominous annual milestone that marks when humanity has consumed more from the Earth than the Earth can replenish in a year.

Globally, the deficit started on 1 August, meaning we are “using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s ecosystems can regenerate”.

National Park Service says collapse is seventh in Rodanthe in four years and warns of dangerous debris on beach

The home on a beach of North Carolina’s Outer Banks leaned against the surf before the pilings below it sagged, then gave way, toppling the entire structure into the sea.

A beachgoer posted video of the collapse on Instagram on 16 August. “A Rodanthe NC house was consumed by the ocean right in front of me!” the caption read.

Category 1 hurricane described as ‘rare event’ in area as officials warn of severe flooding and storm surges

Hurricane Ernesto walloped Bermuda with winds reaching 85mph (137km/h) and waves exceeding 35ft (10.5 metres) offshore from the small British territory in the Atlantic Ocean, as it made landfall early on Saturday – with officials warning of potentially fatal flooding and storm surges.

The storm arrived as a category 1 hurricane after traveling over the archipelago overnight, a trajectory described as a “rare event” by the Weather Channel. It is uncommon for the eye of tropical cyclones to pass directly over these islands, per the network.

Convicted of non-violent offences in Insulate Britain action, Dr Diana Warner is second GP to have licence suspended, which a medical tribunal ruled could damage patient trust

A retired GP has become the second doctor to have their medical licence suspended after being convicted of non-violent offences during peaceful climate protests.

Dr Diana Warner, who worked as a GP for 35 years in surgeries around Bristol, was imprisoned for a total of six weeks for twice breaching private anti-protest injunctions banning people from blocking traffic on the M25 in 2021 and 2022. She was also jailed for six weeks for gluing her hand to the dock during her plea hearing at a magistrates court in east London in 2022.

As the world heats up, methane released from thawing permafrost and warming tropical wetlands is intensifying climate breakdown. But curbing it is achievable

Controlling methane provides our best, and perhaps only, lever for shaving peak global temperatures over the next few decades. This is because it’s cleansed from the air naturally only a decade or so after release. Therefore if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, methane’s concentration would quickly return to pre-industrial levels. Essentially, humans have released in excess of 3bn tonnes of methane into the atmosphere in the past 20 years. Quashing those emissions within a decade or two would save us 0.5C of warming. No other greenhouse gas gives us this much power to slow the climate crisis.

If the Earth keeps warming, though, reducing emissions from human activities may not be enough. We may also need to counter higher methane emissions in nature, including from warming tropical wetlands and thawing Arctic permafrost. The highest natural methane emissions come from wetlands and seasonally flooded forests in the tropics – such as the Brazilian Amazon forest I recently visited at the Mamirauá sustainable development reserve – and they are expected to rise with warming. Tropical wetlands yield so much methane because they are warm, wet (by definition) and low-oxygen environments perfect for growing methane-emitting microbes.

Exclusive: Most popular routes can be reached quickly by train, as government mulls expansion proposal

More than half of the journeys taken from London City airport last year can be reached in six hours or less by train, data reveals.

The Labour government is preparing to make the final call on the airport’s application to significantly increase its passenger numbers. The airport wants to increase capacity from 6.5 million to 9 million passengers a year by putting on more weekend and early morning flights.

Wildfires in Athens, Israeli bombardment in Gaza, Ukraine’s offensive in Russia and Snoop Dogg at the Olympic Games handover: the last seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

• Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing